How reliable is Dun & Bradstreet?

For market research, I go to websites like manta.com, where I can get some basic information about my competitors, however small they are.

Here is some data I could get about a competitor after registering (for free) on manta.com:

Annual Sales (Estimated) $1 to 2.5 million D&B: $160,000*

Employees (Estimated) 5 to 9 D&B: 2*

Obviously, the data from manta is no more than an uneducated guess. But my question is about Dun & Bradstreet numbers, which I tend to be more confident in since rating companies has been D&B's business for almost 2 centuries. Anybody knows how reliable these numbers are? How were they obtained?

I know the company sometimes have questionable ethics, as experienced by a fellow BOSer:

Basically it is just a phone call then, right? If anybody here was called by D&B, I would be curious to know how the "survey" is done, and how often.

I would think a business owner would understate rather than overstate the numbers so as not to attract new competitors. Other than that, I don't really see any big incentive to lie. It looks solid enough to me, but again I would be curious about their methods...

Jason B.
Wednesday, May 26, 2010

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D&B also act as a sort of better-business-bureau by allowing people to report on things like late payments etc.

I have doubts about D&Bs reliability for private companies, and especially for software companies.

One of the areas they look at is trade credit - how much credit suppliers extend to a company. Most software companies buy very little, and probably buy no goods for resale, so have no need of credit and appear to do poorly on this measure.

@Scott : Thank you, this is the kind of information I am looking for. How big is the difference between erroneous D&B numbers and reality? For example, if the errors are less than one order of magnitude, the numbers would still be worth looking at.

Also, did you see any bias toward overstatement or understatement?

Jason B.
Thursday, May 27, 2010

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Yes, less than one order of magnitude. Let's say they say there are 20 employees. That means 4-50.

Scott
Thursday, May 27, 2010

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Oh and bias is towards overstatement in what I've seen.

Scott
Thursday, May 27, 2010

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D&B is used by large companies to see market info on other large companies. It is not worth the expense to you as a small business.

Contractor
Thursday, May 27, 2010

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Just wanted to put my 2 cents, from what I've seen working for a credit report bureau in Canada for the last 7 years.

D&B is mostly used as stated earlier for their credit score by large companie's credit department to accept or deny new clients. The interview is mostly regarding trend of payments for other suppliers. The validation is on the phone an a bit of research (for yearly revenue or employee). Here in Canada (don't know about D&B in US) a credit report usually include bank info, like account balance, NSF cheque, line of credit etc that allow a score to be calculated.

A credit report or credit score is only made for interpretation by credit manager, not as 100 % accurate numbers.